How to Get Your First Freelance Writing Job

Getting your first freelance writing job can be difficult, especially if you have no experience whatsoever in this field, but here are some tips based on my own experiences on how to achieve it:

Twitter Search

Most experienced freelance writer got their first freelance writing job by using this tool and many of them still uses it nowadays. To find freelance writer jobs using this option all you have to do is to search for “Freelance Writer” in the Search Twitter tool and many tweets containing this search are going to show up, then all you have to do is to read all of them until you find the ones actually offering a job (because many of the results are about blog posts on this topic). It can take a while for you to actually get a job and there isn’t many job posting in it, but it’s a way to get started.

Magazines, Blogs and Websites

Most of websites nowadays have a link (usually in its bottom) that will lead you to a page where you can send your non-published articles or pitch to get evaluate. If your article gets picked, besides getting published with your name and bio, most of the times they will pay you for that article. When looking for websites where you can publish remember to always pick the ones with the topics you feel confident writing about and/or have experienced it, it usually makes the article and your pitch even stronger and it’s more likely for them to pick yours to publish.

Freelance Writing Websites

There are many of websites where people looking for freelance writers post their projects and you can bid on it. In this kind of website, most of the times rather there’s an email you can contact them or a certain number of monthly bids you can send to prospective client for free, and after you use all of them you can buy more bids if you want. As a freelance writer is important to have an account in as many of them as you can and to check it often for new opportunities. It’s important to note that as a freelance writer, especially in the beginning, jobs won’t be looking for you, so you have to look for them.

Contribute and Guest Post

Before thinking of contributing, you need to find a topic you love and have something to say about it. Once you do so, start writing articles and pitching to websites and blogs related to this topic. Even know you are not paid for most guest post and contributing writing articles, even though it is not impossible to find paying ones, it is important as a freelance writer to have background experience in certain topics. Most of the time in freelance writing job advertisement they will look for “Freelance Writers with Experience in Writing About…”, so having a few articles about this topic is not only good but most of the times necessary!

Get Out of Your Comfort Zone

Being a freelance writer is all about getting out of your comfort zone and learning about new things (which is necessary since every article should always be well researched). Having a topic you choose to write about because you know a lot about it or just because it’s your passion is great, we all have something that makes us happy and excited to write about, but don’t get stuck in only writing about such topic. It’s important to read about new things and try to make articles about it until you feel comfortable taking freelance writing jobs about this other topic. Remember, there are a lot of freelance writing jobs out there and they won’t always be about your favorite topic, but don’t miss out on opportunities because of fear of trying!